Dr Ibrahim Kalin - The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre

templation”; nutq, “talking/thinking”; hukm, “judgment”;
hikmah, “wisdom”; and dhikr, “remembrance/invocation”.
The Qur’anic usage of these terms, whose full exposition
requires a separate study, establishes a context of integrated
thinking in which our encounter with reality unveils different
aspects of the all-inclusive reality of existence. More
importantly, it leads to a mode of thinking that combines
empirical observation, rational analysis, moral judgment
and spiritual refinement.
This rich vocabulary points to the wholeness of perceiving
and thinking. In contrast to categorical distinctions
between sensate perception and conceptual analysis, our
natural or ‘first-order’ encounter with things takes place as
a unitary experience. In perceiving things, our sense organs
and reason work together. The sharp distinctions between
sensate qualities, which correspond to the physical-material
world, and intellectual notions, which correspond to the
world of the mind, are reflections of the Cartesian bifurcation
between res extensa and res cogitans and hardly give us
an accurate description of the actual act of perceiving and
understanding. These categories belong to the ‘second-order’
reflection upon reality whereby we make distinctions
between subject and object, the knower and the known, the
perceiver and the perceived, mental and material, etc. Our
first-order encounter with the world takes place in a different
context.
The wholeness of our epistemic experience of things
30 | Kalin